Feminism in Russia - Passport magazine

The Way It Is
The Jury’s Out on Juries in Russia
Ian Mitchell
Juries were established in Russian in 1866,
contributing to the democratisation of
the judicial branch of government. But
the autocracy retained control over the
legislative and executive branches. Could
these two different approaches co-exist?
The issue which brought the matter to a
head was terrorism. The first attempt to
murder Tsar Alexander II was made ten
days after the first jury sat. The campaign
intensified after that. The purpose of law
is to enable dispute resolution without
violence. Could juries help to save Russia
from bloodshed?
2 April 2011
(part3)
I ended the last article with the most famous terrorist trial in
Russian history, in March 1878, of an idealistic young woman
called Vera Zasulich. It raised issues fundamental to the whole
question of juries in a society as polarised as Russia was, so it
is worth considering in more detail. These issues have echoes
today, and not just in Russia: think of the Diplock courts in
Northern Ireland, where juries were dispensed with for terrorist
cases, and Guantanamo Bay.
Briefly, Zasulich had shot and wounded the Governor of St
Petersburg, Feodor Trepov, as an act of pubic retribution after
he had ordered the brutal flogging of a young student, called
Arkhip Bogoliubov, who had been sentenced to fifteen years’
hard labour for participating as an “outside agitator” in the
first major workers’ demonstration in Russia, in 1876.
Bogoliubov had tried to speak to the Governor when he
was visiting the jail where he was confined. It seems that
Bogoliubov failed to tip his cap in the prescribed manner so
Trepov slapped him, and his cap fell of. To be bare-headed in
the presence of the Governor was an insult. Trepov decided
to make an example of Bogoliubov, and ordered that he be
given twenty-five lashes.
Afterwards, the blood-stained birch rods were mounted on
the prison walls as a deterrent to the other inmates. Though
Bogoliubov did not lose consciousness during the beating,
he was so badly injured, both physically and psychologically,
that he went insane and died a few years later in a remote
provincial jail.
Six months later, Zasulich shot Trepov. She did not try to
avoid arrest, even though she expected to be hung for her
crime. Her act was a demonstration.
The judge at Zasulich’s trial was a dedicated, idealistic
young lawyer called Anatoli Koni who had, at the time of the
flogging, been working in the Ministry of Justice. He pointed
out to the Minister, a Baltic German called Count von Pahlen
(whose house I visited in Estonia recently—see the photograph
on page 25 of PASSPORT November 2010), that the
flogging was illegal in the circumstances, as was Bogoliubov’s
original conviction. Von Pahlen, who had approved the flogging,
decided Koni should be demoted, and sent him to the
“backwater” of the St Petersburg Circuit Court.
Von Pahlen, who spoke Russian with a heavy German accent,
was an intelligent, dedicated, scrupulously honest
public servant who had done most of the hard work on Alexander
II’s reforms that had brought juries to Russia twelve
years previously. He believed in public opinion as a factor in
law and also in the importance of judicial independence. He
wanted a court system which would help make autocracy
publicly acceptable.
But the shooting of senior public officials could not be
tolerated, in any system. Von Pahlen wanted Zasulich condemned
in the eyes of the public as well as officialdom,
and the whole idea of juries was that they would do that.
Strictly speaking, Zasulich should have been tried in secret
as a political prisoner before a committee of the Russian
Imperial Senate. But von Pahlen intervened to send her for
trial by a jury.
That meant she came up before Anatoli Koni. Von Pahlen
summoned the newly demoted judge to his office and told